2016 Annual Juried Competition and Exhibition

BAXTER ST at CCNY is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2016 Annual Juried Photography Competition and an upcoming exhibition featuring the top three competition artists, juried by artist Mickalene Thomas. The three top winners – First Place Winner Travis Brown, Second Place Winner Danielle Eliska Lyle, and Third Place Winner Marc Ohrem-Leclef offer three different but cohesive visions of contemporary photographic practice.

In addition to the exhibition, the winners will also have their work shown on the CCNY website from August 2016 on. Joining their work on the website will be work from fifteen Honorable Mentions artists.

Of the three artists selected by this year’s juror, Mickalene Thomas, Marc Ohrem-Leclef makes the strongest impression, with photographs and a video about residents of fourteen favelas in Rio de Janeiro who were displaced by the Olympic Games. (In lieu of Olympic torches, they hold emergency flares.) Travis Brown’s photographs of West Tennessee—portraits, still-lifes, a vine-strangled landscape—owe a debt to Alec Soth’s similarly scattered and soulful takes on rural America. Danielle Eliska Lyle’s portraits of actresses are stylish but not as trenchant as her video of the same subjects, in which the women riff on insecurity, sexism, and the importance of being true to yourself in a sometimes hostile world. The New Yorker Goings On About Town.

About the Juror:New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas is best known for her elaborate paintings composed of rhinestones, acrylic and enamel. Thomas introduces a complex vision of what it means to be a woman and expands common definitions of beauty. Her work stems from her long study of art history and classical genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life. Inspired by various sources that range from 19th century Hudson River School to Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse and Romare Bearden, she continues to explore notions of beauty from a contemporary perspective infused with more recent influences of popular culture and pop art. She is represented by Lehmann Maupin in New York, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, and Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris.